Rainbow – Kesha

Overcoming the songwriting inconsistencies of finding intriguing melodies and interesting textures, which were highlights in only a few songs, was Kesha’s wonderful ability to communicate to her audience, both in blatancy and subtlety, with her obvious passion and intent turning a mere fun pop exploration into an important listen for new music and culture enthusiasts.

Let me start off on a side note: what a strong, intelligent, and powerful woman. To be able to acknowledge and recover from her terrible mistreatment in her recent past by showing up to work with passion like this is amazing by anyone’s standards. With that said, the question then becomes how well her intentions came across musically. My answer: very, very well. The greatest aspect about this work is the way Kesha communicates to her audience from blatant simplicity to smart subtlety. Her intelligence as a musician and as a person shines through in her calm collectiveness and entertaining musical structures while dealing with heavy emotion, and as someone who vaguely knows her past output, I can say with some certainty that this is her most intelligent work to date. Now, there’s certainly room to improve in terms of songwriting consistency. Melodic intrigue was very hit and miss, being an amazing force in “Let ‘Em Talk” and “Learn To Let Go” but too plain and humdrum in “Hymn” and “Praying”. The timbre of the album, while being somewhat unique and enjoyable enough for a pop setting, was always a bit too cheap and watered down to make a gigantic impact. This was a nice rebirth for Kesha, though. It may be difficult for her to shed the dry pop star sound as a whole, even with her small acoustic experiments here, but she has shown she has the talent and adversity to continue bringing worthwhile output to the music world.